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Teaching
Non-Romanized Languages
Scott Alkire
Open Society Fund –
E-mail: s_alkire@hotmail.com
Teaching
© 2004 Scott Alkire
Speakers of non-Romanized languages
face special challenges in learning to read English: a new alphabet, the
left-to-right direction of English text (new to many of these learners), and,
most significantly, the letter-sound correspondences of English, which are
relatively complex among Romanized languages. Fortunately, strategies for
overcoming these challenges are presented in a text by the famous linguist
Leonard Bloomfield and the lexicographer Clarence Barnhart (Bloomfield &
Barnhart, 1961). Though Bloomfield and Barnhart’s text was designed for
teaching native-English-speaking children to read, with minor modifications it
can be used to successfully teach speakers of non-Romanized languages to read
as well.
This paper discusses
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Establish a single phonetic value for each letter |
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EFL
teachers who have taught in Asia or the Middle East (to give two examples) know
that speakers of non-Romanized languages face special challenges in learning to
read English: a new alphabet, the
left-to-right direction of English text (new to many of these learners), and,
most significantly, the letter-sound correspondences of English, which are
relatively complex among Romanized languages. Fortunately, strategies for
overcoming these challenges are presented in a text by the famous linguist
Leonard Bloomfield and the lexicographer Clarence Barnhart (Bloomfield &
Barnhart, 1961). Though Bloomfield and Barnhart’s text was designed for
teaching native-English-speaking children to read, with minor modifications it
can be used to successfully teach speakers of non-Romanized languages to read as
well.
This paper
discusses Bloomfield and Barnhart’s two preparatory steps to their lessons,
their first 36 lessons, and suggests modifications of the lessons for the EFL
learner. The preparatory steps and first 36 lessons were selected as a point of
focus because they address the initial challenges faced by speakers of
non-Romanized languages when learning to read English, and because Bloomfield
(1961, p. 57) calls them “the foundation” of the learner’s reading.
Bloomfield and Barnhart's first preparatory
step is to introduce learners to the English letters and their alphabetic
pronunciation. This step is straightforward and shouldn't pose many
difficulties for learners: most probably already know how English letters are
pronounced through worldwide use of British/American series of initials which
denote organisations, countries, objects or other
phenomena (e.g., BBC, CD, IBM, PC,
The teacher should present the alphabet in
uppercase letters, left-to-right, across the blackboard and model the
pronunciation of each letter. After the learners have recited the alphabet and
have a grasp of each letter, the teacher should write common series of initials
on the board. The initials will illustrate that the left-to-right order of
symbols corresponds to the sooner-to-later order of spoken sounds in words. The
learners should be encouraged to offer initials of their own. To reinforce the
acquisition of the letters and their sounds, the teacher can present various
dictations such as the alphabet, other initials, or random series of letters.
After the students have learned the uppercase forms of the alphabet, the
teacher should teach the lowercase forms. Again, various dictations should be
given.
The relative ease of this step can serve as an early confidence
builder--important to second language learning success.
Establish a single phonetic value for each
letter
The second preparatory step is
to teach each letter as having a single phonetic value. These values are
different from the letters’ alphabetic values (with the exception of x).
Bloomfield and Barnhart (1961) recommend the following values, which
a as in hat
b as in big
c as in cat [1]
d as in dog
e as in pet
f as in fan
g as in get
h as in hen
i as in pin
j as in jet
k as in kid [1]
l as in let
m as in man
n as in net
o as in hot
p as in pen
q as in quit [2]
r as in red
s as in sad
t as in tan
u as in cut
v as in van
w as in wet
x as in exit [2]
y as in yes
z as in zip
The teacher should lead the
learners in the pronunciation of these words to reinforce the acquisition of
the phonetic values they represent. The teacher should also give word
dictations to reinforce the sound-spelling correlations of the words.
First 36 lessons: focusing on vowels
Bloomfield and Barnhart’s first 36 lessons (“Part I: First Reading”)
consist of two- and three-letter words using the phonetic values given above
(save q and x). Since the vowels a, e, i, o, u are the
letters which, later on, will present the greatest difficulty to learners,
Bloomfield and Barnhart divide the 36 lessons into five groups according to
them.
Lessons 1-8 a as in hat
Lessons 9-16 i as in pin
Lessons 17-24 u as in cut
Lessons 25-30 e as in pet
Lessons 31-36 o as in hot
Within each of these five groups, it is possible to form groups by final
consonant (e.g., bat, cat, fat, etc.) or by initial
consonant (e.g., bad, bag, bat, etc.). Bloomfield and
Barnhart (1961, p. 41) begin with the former because “it is easier to watch the
first letter than the last, and because rhyme is familiar to the student.” [3]
Bloomfield and Barnhart suggest the following for Lesson 1:
The teacher writes the word
can
on the blackboard and tells the
learners to read off the letters in order: /see/ /aye/ /en/. The teacher then
tells the learners to say can.
The teacher writes another word with the same vowel and final consonant,
but with a different initial consonant, for instance
Dan
The teacher asks the learners to read off the letters in order: /dee/ /aye/ /en/. The teacher then tells the learners to say
Dan.
Now the teacher must work with the learners until they can distinguish
between can and Dan--that is, until the learners can read each
correctly when it is shown by itself and with the other.
After this has been achieved, the teacher adds two or three more words
of the same group, for example
fan, man,
The drill should continue until the learners can correctly read any one
of the words when the teacher points to it. Then the words should be shown in
various orders, and separately, until the learners can easily read all of them.
The teacher presents the other words of the group in the same way as the
first five:
pan, ran, tan, an,
ban, van
Then, the teacher presents the words with articles, for example:
a can a
fan a pan a man
a van a tan van a tan fan
And then short sentences:
Dan ran.
Once the “-an” group of words has been learned, both in isolation and in
short sentences, the teacher proceeds to another final consonant group, e.g.,
the “-at” group (Lesson 2), and follows the same procedure as in Lesson 1,
except this time at the end of the lesson he/she presents pairs such as
bat ban, cat can, fat fan, mat
man, Nat Nan, pat pan
These pairs are important for attuning the learners’ ears to the subtle
sound-meaning correlations of English.
* * *
In this fashion Bloomfield and Barnhart present their first 36 lessons,
the last several of which consist of complete sentences such as “Dad got on a
bus” and “Don had a nap on a cot” and “A man had a bed in a van.” The lessons
avoid orthographic or phonetic exceptions: none have words with silent letters
(e.g., knit, gnat) or double letters, either in the pronunciation of
single sounds (as in add, bell) or in special values (as in see, too).
No lessons have words with combinations of letters having a special value (as th in thin or ea in
bean). This is essential to
Completion of these lessons is enough to launch learners into reading.
The following modifications make
1. On the first
line of each of Bloomfield and Barnhart’s lessons there is a list of
phonetically similar words to be studied and read.
2. Bloomfield
and Barnhart use nonsense words in each lesson for their phonemic value. It is
recommended that the EFL teacher omit them, for the reasons given above.
(Bloomfield and Barnhart allow that they are not essential to the lessons.)
3. Dictations
can and should be used with
Over 100 years ago, Henry Sweet (1899, p. 35), the leading British
philologist of his day, wrote that “the greatest help in learning a (foreign)
alphabet is to establish definite associations between the symbol and its
sound.” His claim has never been seriously challenged, and Bloomfield and
Barnhart’s text, still in print after 43 years, establishes those definite
associations--associations which happen to be the major obstacle faced by
reading students whose L1 is a non-Romanized language. With the minor
modifications suggested above, teachers can use Bloomfield and Barnhart’s two
preparatory steps and first 36 lessons (at least) to successfully teach reading
to these learners.
1.
c and k both designate the same English phoneme.
This may be an obstacle later, when the student learns to write, but is not a
problem now.
2.
q and
x should not be used in initial lessons--q because it occurs in
connection with an unusual value of the letter u (for w), and x
because it represents two phonemes (ks or gz).
Bloomfield, L. & Barnhart, C. L. (1961) Let’s read: A linguistic approach.
Sweet, H. (1899) The
practical study of languages.
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